Show A trip through the uintah basin IX BY PROF EARL DOUGLASS As soon as it was light campfires camp fires were burning and all were out by sunrise some different from a city remarked one gentleman 1 I should say so I 1 suppose that anything but an earthquake or a comet striking the earth could get some of this crowd out at this time of day everone was enjoying the scenery as they did the night before As the sun began to appear above the eastern hills crag after crag tower after tower and pyramid after pyramid was dashed with morning mornin t light one party sang the stanza the cities of old that were reared in crime and renowned by the praise of seers went down in the tramp of old king time to sleep with the gray haired years but the beautiful hills rise bright and strong through the smoke of old time wars As on the day when the first deep song rolled up from trie morning stars then all joined and sang it over several times delving into secrets of the past the professor then said today we are going farther back in time thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands of years and yet we are going toward the sunrise and toward the mysterious hills those dome shaped forms with gentler slopes have been carved from formations older than the rocks here what mysterious records do they contain shall we be able to read a part at least of the chronicles of old you have heard about the fossil insects and fossil plants but you will doubtless see and learn other things of which you have hardly dreamed we retraced our course to bonanza but before we e reached that now deserted stage station we stopped in the hills a little to the northwestward to examine extensions of the bonanza veins in that direction the surfaces of the veins had been opened up and cleared away in places where representing work had bad been done in one locality where the gilsonite was well exposed it was seen that the side or sides of the vein were different from the middle having a splintery or fibrous appearance or fracture it had bad what in geology is called a columnar ture the miners here call it pencil the columns or f fibres are at tight right angles angle s to geologist for the carnegie museum tenson jenson utah the wall of the vein the middle of the vein is massive and breaks with fracture touching on sources source s of vein hydrocarbons cunningham craig in his book oil finding says that when vein hydrocarbons hydro carb carbons ons manjak are treated with petroleum ether it removes in solution a percentage which is called while the insoluble percentage is called he says the most valuable types of vein hydrocarbons hydro carbons are jet black bright bricht and lustrous with a beautiful conc holdal fracture and a high percentage of small percentages of water volatile matter and in organic impurities are always present the quality of a sample is determined by its freedom from impurities and its percentage tile constituents every phenomenon afan of an intrusive dyke or vein of igneous rock ock is simulated by these intrusive bi and veins may be seen with margins of columnar structure and a central portion of the lustrous concholar variety which presents a later indru intrusion sion the percentage of also increases toward the center of every vein and further increases in analogous parts of the same vein as it is traced to deeper levels while a vein that does not crop out at the surface generally contains a greater proportion of than one that is exposed these facts prove that there is a gradual loss of constituents and a gradual drying up or of the mineral towards the sides of the vein and to wards the surface p remember these facts they may help ML cliffs of the lower uinta on a branch of the Wagon hound canyon near white river of since a high proportion of the latter enables the solid bitumen to be fluxed more easily columnar jointing is a frequent phenomenon in veins of manjak and it may extend across the whole vein the columns being at right angles to the sides the columnar variety is usually poorer in than the variety with the conc holdal fracture it has also a duller lustre and a coaly fracture the structure is due to aboss a loss of vola solve the problem of the origin of these hy by dro carbons and how bow they got here in the white river region from here we follow the uinta road to bonanza and then go on the watson road to near the place where it goes down the wag canyon to white river here near the top of the divide we turn to the eastward and follow a road near the top of the ridge soon the road descends quite steeply into a little valley which pursues a winding course between bluffs and hills capped with bands of massive sandstone toward white river we stop on the crest of the hill where there is an excellent view of the country in nearly every direction the professor says we are not nearly at the bottom of the middle uinta formation in going down the ravine as the grade is quite steep we pass quickly through the lower uinta deposits they are here somewhere near feet in thickness underlying these is the green river formation you can see its outcrop in the hills which rise higher and higher to the southward you can again look backward toward the north and see the plain of the middle uinta interrupted by what appears in the distance to be comparatively low escarpments and mesas beyond these are the gray bad lands and still farther the red bad lands of the upper uinta I 1 wish you to especial ly notice one thing and that is the geological structure on which we stand look it over carefully A plunging anticline discovered why the rocks dip toward the northwest do they not yes but do they dip in any other direction in looking at the green river to the lets see to the southeastward it looks as if they bend down or dip to the westward or northwestward Is that true let us sight with a clinometer yes they dip two or three degrees at least now suppose that we were on top of a swell and the beds dipped on one side toward the southwest on the other toward the northeast and that there is a dip also toward the north northwest blest what kind of a geological ture would that be an anticline A plunging anticline that is correct it is an anticline that dips in three directions gilsonite veins are studied 1 I wish you to notice the gilsonite veins also the vein which we first struck yesterday a little north of the shearing plant is the cowboy vein the two veins near bonanza are the little bonanza and big bonanza the one a little north of us is the chakita Cha pita and in going down the ravine toward white river we will see the wagon hound vein cutting through the hills and 7 A 47 YIN VR 0 1 1 the lower uinta deposits looking northwestward from near white river sandstone ledges these veins all extend in the same direction there must be some natural law which we have not discovered governing their formation nia tion a gentleman said are there other veins beside these A good many of them it strange a lady remarked yes all things which we do not understand are strange and mysterious but by careful and persistent investigation we can put the mystery farther away where it will not so much interfere with practical operations do the veins go down into the green river formation yes 9 how far do they extend through it we shall see hunting exposed deep oil formations oh I 1 understand now a lady exclaimed we are going down this valley in daylight to try to find where these veins co come me from instead of taking the time and going to the expense of drilling a hole a thousand feet deep from a higher level and then not be able to see into the hole after it is drilled now you have the idea I 1 said you would make a geologist and now you are one real geologists dont spend hundreds of thousands of dollars drilling into rock to fo study stud y it when they can study it from the surface not far away 1 I wish some oil companies would not broke in a gentleman who had invested some money in oil propositions hurrah shouted a young man lets find the bottom of one of these veins come on say remarked a bi big man it be fine if we could trace a little to one of those fat bugs or mosquitoes that our fossil hunter told us about last night if the oil comes from mosquitoes I 1 can explain the whole mystery said another gentleman you dont have to go back to the early tertiary I 1 was down on the river once in july but bui you might be like yankee 4 X ar skull bluffs lower uinta deposits capped by middle uinta one or more skulls of theres were found here and the quarry is beyond the sag to the right of the middle looking northwestward notice carnegie museum camp camo in cedars to right doodle who see the town on account of there being so many houses st down to the green river the ride down the valley was a pleasant one riffi finally ally the character of the rocks sud denly changed and the heavy abrupt ledges of sandstone were seen to overlie light colored which weathered into gentle slopes are these the green river sha lesT yes and the sandstones overlying them are lower uinta yes that is what we will have to call them until we can find fossils in them which will correlate them with some other formation some call these lower sandstone and shale beds bridger because they overlie the green river formation and the bridger beds north of the uinta mountains in wyoming overlies over lies the same formation but the bridger formation in the bridger basin h has a s yielded a rich and varied mammalian fauna while as yet so far as I 1 know no mani mammals mals or other identifiable fossils have been found here you will notice that the contact be le A AC k 7 black dragon gilsonite vein dragon utah tween the green river and uinta is very De peculiar cullar here in places in some localities it looks as if the green river formation had become land and had been eroded into hills something as you see it now across the river and that afterward the valleys had been filled with sandstone and later sandstones had bad covered the whole but in some places there are masses or lenses of sandstone entirely surrounded by the this is not yet fully understood but here is the vein which we saw several times when we were coming down from the top of the hill look back and you will see it something like two feet in thickness cutting through the sandstone hills it continues down into this hill of shale but it is not so thick lets follow it down and see where it goes all right let two stand in line along the vein and sight us in so we can follow its course where it is not exposed you see the vein does not come to the surface on account of the soil and debris over it you can however see pieces of the gilsonite on the slope downhill down hill from the v vein ein we keep in line and go over the rim of the canyon into which if it extends that deep the vein dieters on a piece of the shale soon parts of leaves are found and then look here heres a flower are fossil flowers common 1 I should say not soon the ledge is lined with bug hunt ers the little canyon resounds with the sound of hammers and exclamations of wonder and delight oh look at this pretty leaf see ive found a beetle that still shows spots on its wings after a while le three or four of the party go back and agan aga n try to trace the vein of gilsonite in a place near the bottom of the hill where the vein was first seen they go ai V aj N fit a iva rivet river the feeders rf of a larger of gilsonite near the top of the green top in the sandstones of the lower uinta near the camp white river bot bottom tom vein the above lower uinta 0 overlying ver lying the green river from t the he oil shale camp near white river ought to be seen but we are disappointed as debris and slide rock cover the steep slope in the line of the vein an unusual sight in the formation but in the outcrops of the hard shale on the other side of the canyon near the bottom it is seen that the shale is broken vertically into blocks of varying thickness almost as straight as if cut by a knife these seams have the same direction as the gilsonite veins we look in these little seams I 1 for gilsonite but do da lt not ot discover any the professor and others begin splitting up slabs of shale oh professor says one here is a mosquito and sure enough there is the impression like a picture of one of the little to work with picks and shovel to clear off the debris here it is one exclaimed and shows a little vein about an inch thick it is narrowing fast we must be getting 0 near the bottom heres another and another there there are four of them five six they keep on digging until a place is cleared several feet long and three or four feet wide then they took a whisk broom and swept it off clean there are thirteen or fourteen ve inlets in sight from the thickness of a knife blade to perhaps two inches in width while the intervening blocks or slabs vary from one inch or le less ss to a foot in width one or two veins are discontinuous others run into each other indications of oil in the shale it looks as though we are getting near the source it the between the veins look as if they had a trace of oil in them one gentleman goes to call a friend and soon the whole party is looking at the uncovered area while it is being photographed now what do you think said a gentleman ge tle to his friend it looks encouraging its what we ought to expect but im not satisfied yet if we could get a test of oil from these it would be fine but I 1 want to get to the very bottom of these ve inlets and see where they are actually forming you probably can not see this near the surface as the volatile portion of the oil has escaped that may be but I 1 want undoubted proof that it has taken place the spirit I 1 admire said the professor come with me tomorrow and we will see what we can find |